Say yellow to yellow with the YOLO S7 camera.
It is a very unique webcam in the sense
that it is a webcam designed for streaming and content creation that has a removable lens.
That's so exciting. What do we get in the box? We get that sleeve so you can bring that camera around.
We get quite a beefy type A to type C,
which is our data cable. And it's quite long. That looks to be about 10 feet.
That's pretty nice. As far as 10 feet from your computer,
that's incredible. Okay, that's a little facetious. It is meant to be a webcam,
so 10 feet is actually plenty long. In this box, we have a C to C power cable.
Looks to be about the same big finesse and length, maybe a little bit shorter.
But both of these connectors actually have a little screwing bit so that it locks
that even when you move the camera, you're not in super large danger
of just yonking out a cable in the middle of the live stream, which would be catastrophic.
We have our quick start guide and our product manual, and that's it.
YOLO also sent us a power adapter, although you could presumably use a different USB PD-1.
What am I looking at?
That's a really long brick. If it's on a surge protector that's on the ground,
not a big deal, but if you're plugging it into a wall, that is a lot of weight
on something that has very little resistance. This little doohickey's good for up to 45 watts at 20 volts,
but that wouldn't be necessary. The camera itself uses 12 watts of power,
and so this should be plenty, but you also have a lot of versatility
in the kind of power bricks you could be using. Inside this one, we have, oh nice,
a little L bracket with quarter 20 slots,
as well as a slot that we could put another quarter 20 to mount our camera in its vertical orientation.
This is predominantly for short form content creation,
presumably, although that makes less sense to me
than it being a streaming camera. I have a lot of questions about this thing
that I hope I will be able to answer. Last thing inside this box is our quarter 20 tripod
little screw. The L bracket itself is actually a pretty good quality. This is pretty on par with something I would expect
from a small rig or something, and the fact that you have the three mounting holes
on the back is actually a pretty nice quality of life thing. Thankfully, we've got some pretty good versatility.
We have a microphone jack, we have an HDMI out,
and then we have two type C's, one is for power, and one is for data, and that's because
you can actually stream using the HDMI out
and the type C. The type C will be limited to 1080p,
but if you're Twitch streaming, that's more than enough, especially when you go non-fullscreen,
so I don't think that's a huge, huge factor, and if I was using this at home, I actually probably would do that
to avoid having another HDMI box or card
in order to read that. On the top, we have our cold shoe mount
so that you could put accessories, presumably, you could put your mic that you'd plug into the back.
Side's very plain, bottom quarter 20. On the front, we have our sensors and laser
for the time of flight autofocus, which is a pretty cool feature for a camera like this.
It uses basically a laser, and the time it takes for that laser to come back to the camera in order to measure the depth,
which would allow for really fast autofocus. YOLO claims 0.08 seconds of autofocus,
although my guess is that measurement isn't including the whole process of it,
and it also will depend on the lens, yes, because when you're using a camera with good autofocus,
having the right lenses on that camera can make a huge difference.
In fact, YOLO recommends just two lenses, the 25 and 15 mil lenses,
which would give you a lot of the room without having too much fisheyeing on the lenses,
especially as it is a micro for a third camera, so there's a crop factor,
so the 25 is about a 50 millimeter, which is good for portraits,
and that'll be great for a face cam, but actually would kind of get a little tight
when you really think about it. I'm thinking about it. Just like I'm thinking about how time of flight autofocus
has the advantage of being really fast and really accurate, but it also has a limit in the distance it can measure.
That's not a big deal for a camera like this, that's not really designed to get big wide shots
or moving subjects that are really, really far away, and so I think that's a pretty reasonable compromise
and a smart design choice for its use case, which is have a damn good looking webcam, baby,
and sensor size is a huge factor when it comes to having good image.
Not only does it mean that each pixel will be larger,
which allows for more light and better low light performance, it also gives you access to a whole suite of lenses
that are designed to have a more cinematic look with depth of field, as well as just like versatility and how you can use it,
and so I actually think this is a really, really cool use case for people that are predominantly tied to a computer
and streaming all the time. One thing you'll notice that I haven't talked about
is a screen, as opposed to most more versatile cameras.
This doesn't have a screen because it's expecting you to be tied to a computer,
which is predominantly a con, IMO.
That seems like a really impractical way of doing it. Like why not have this be self-sustaining?
Although the trade-off could be the money they save
on that computing internally, could be put towards making a better image quality
for the price, but that remains to be seen. Just like it remains to be seen
if this thing actually can stream forever, like YOLO claims, they say because of the design
and all aluminum body, it'll dissipate heat fast enough that you could presumably stream indefinitely,
which is fantastic. I haven't had too much issue streaming from mirrorless
or DSLR in terms of overheating, but I have had overheating issues,
mostly when I'm doing internal recording on Sony cameras
a few generations ago, and it's very, very frustrating
when you're in the middle of an interview and you're like, can you wait 20 minutes
while I just wait here for my equipment to cool off?
Thankfully, that won't be a problem with this. You just press the button, take the lens cap off,
look at that giant frickin' sensor. Okay, it's not giant compared to like full frame cameras,
but compared to webcams, bro, this thing's like four times bigger, it's crazy.
This sensor is a Sony IMX sensor. There's not a ton of technical details.
What we do know is that it's good for 4K 60 across the whole sensor and it has dual native ISO,
although we don't know specifically which ISOs they're talking about, but can range from 100 ISO to 9,600 ISO.
So that's a pretty dang good range, although I'm curious to see how grainy it gets at 9,600.
You know what I'm saying, dog? Ah! We've got our YOLO S7 set up on a C stand.
That's probably not what you're gonna wanna do. You're gonna wanna get some kind of mount for your behind your monitor or to an ARM.
Thankfully, the quarter 20 means that it's gonna be fairly easy. The other thing to note is that as a safety feature,
the sensor's not supposed to activate without a lens, and that's a good thing because if you have your lens off
and the sensor on, the electrostatic can actually draw dust to it and damage the sensor,
so that's a nice little nifty little safety feature. You know what I'm saying?
I just have to say, this looks pretty good. It has the benefit of that proper, not quite cine lens,
so you get the cool depth of field effect like you can see Glenn in the back is out of focus.
It's doing a pretty good job tracking me.
This isn't the recommended lens, but in terms of if I was streaming, that's really not bad.
So let's see what we got for controls. And I will say that even though the camera
is really shaking on the tripod, you can see in this camera,
the actual video feed is not too bad. Like it's obviously a little bit jittery,
but that's not that bad. There's got to be some kind of stabilization
or maybe I'm just losing my mind. In our camera adjustment panels, we've got our video settings.
We can go from landscape to portrait. If I was using this at home, I would be using it in landscape.
Gosh, wow. I can say if I'm only comparing to webcams,
this is the best looking webcam I've ever seen. If we're comparing to cameras that are the same price as it,
that remains to be seen. And then we have our HDMI resolution.
We're actually limited to 1080p through the USB-C. That's plenty for our purposes today,
but it's nice to know that you could do 4K through the camera, especially if you're making YouTube videos.
For streaming, I don't think that 4K is as important.
Next, we have our imaging settings. That's a really subtle change in our white balance.
I prefer the cool colors, although I think they got their naming schemes backward
because this cool colors one's actually tending warmer
to adjust for colder lights. So I think I look better with that.
You can adjust your sharpness to really cook those pores
or really soft, which almost looks a little bit out of focus,
but not too bad. We have contrast. We can cook it or uncook it.
We can adjust our saturation. I can say something sad.
People ask how you're doing. You have to say you're fine, but you're not really fine.
Deep down inside to hurt. Wow, that felt really real.
We have our distortion correction, which we'll adjust for fisheye, although we don't need that
because we're using a 25 millimeter lens. So you can see I'm actually fairly far away.
Like it's now me, like a centimeter away from touching. This works if you can get the camera behind the monitor.
It's a little bit close for what I'd be doing in our purposes today. Then we got vignetting correction,
which is not as much of a problem I found on micro for thirds.
It's usually when you're using zoom lenses on bigger sensors,
but it's possible that there's lenses that would vignette. So it'll just basically adjust the edges of the frame
to not get darker. Next up, we have our focus.
So first we can adjust our channel, which should reduce the signal interference
between cameras. I don't do a ton of multicam auto focus stuff.
So I've never experienced that before, but you can change it so there won't be any interference.
Then you have your continuous auto focus, your single auto focus or your face.
So face seems to have some kind of just like face tracking. I imagine for most people, they'll want that.
And we can change the focus speed because although technically you want the fastest tracking,
sometimes it looks unnatural to have like a robot auto focus when it's too fast.
And there's something like a cinematic quality that people actually enjoy more
when there's a little bit of a slow rack. And so I'm actually gonna go standard on my focus speed.
Next, we got our zoom. I wonder what that does.
No. We have our hot keys so we can set different levels of zoom to different keys.
But seeing as that we're already at the maximum zoom I'd want to be, we are not gonna need that.
Next, we have our AI parameter.
Why are they calling this an AI feature? This is just controlling a basic feature of the camera.
That's stupid. Don't call it a AI man. It's just controlling your aperture.
We can set the amount of AI blurring they do
as well as like the aperture settings in that menu.
So it wants me to say still, select your preferred image brightness.
This one's a little bit different.
Why did it do this weird color thing? This looks terrible.
It looks so much worse than it did before. Your AI gets a big thumbs down
on top of the regular AI thumbs down for me. We are going to reset.
So much better. Also, I want to have manual control over all my stuff.
You might want to go to the auto and it actually seems like it's done a pretty good job
getting my skin tones about where I would want them. But I much prefer having my controls all manual.
They have two different settings here that do the same thing, but with a different name.
So if you don't know, the wider you have your aperture in a lens,
the more blurred things are gonna look when they're out of focus.
If you have a small little aperture, there's more depth of your scene that will be in focus.
If you close your aperture by going to the higher numbers, you will not only get a darker image
because less light is going through the smaller hole, but more of your scene will be in focus.
Seeing as we're having a good time at f 1.8, that's great. Or you can use their dropdown for blur low, medium high,
which basically closes your aperture and makes things dark.
I feel like that's fine, but that should be in the auto side of the settings,
not the manual side. So we're just gonna leave that there.
Next we have our ISO settings. I imagine that it's 400, 800.
So we'll go to 400. Either of them looks pretty good,
like not particularly grainy. The image quality, it looks like I've got a pretty good dynamic range.
I think 400 is plenty. Next we have our shutter speed. And I actually think that they're not right
about this shutter speed because this is 60 FPS.
And generally when you're doing camera stuff, you have your shutter speed at one over twice your frame rate
so that the shutter is open half of the frames. That's the most cinematic look,
but it wouldn't look quite right if you're shooting one sixtieth with a 60 FPS frame rate.
It would look a little bit soft. And I don't think that's quite right. So I actually think they're lying to me,
but this does sort of have that 30 FPS look,
even though it's presumably actually at 60 FPS. So that's fine.
And if I'm doing Twitch streaming, I'm gonna be at 60 FPS anyway. Next we have our white balance, which is great.
The auto stuff did a pretty darn good job. We got our Greenland look.
And we have our Mexico look. And then we have a blue and red offset
where we can pick a specific color. I actually thought the auto white balance did a pretty good job.
So I'm just gonna leave it at that on auto. Although if I was setting up for a long-term stream,
I probably would find the right setting so that I don't have to worry about midstream kind of shifting
if I have weird color things that happen. We actually have access to more color correcting.
So you can take a capture image and then color correct that and kind of set that as a preset.
We don't need to do that. This looks good as it is. And then a live scene button,
they put everything back on auto, which actually is a good thing for me to point out.
In the exposure setting on auto, you can actually have an anti-flicker setting.
So for 50 or 60 hertz, depending where you are in the world. And then you can kind of have a lot of the same settings.
So you can set your aperture here, but then you can also set sort of your amount
of expected light to compensate for. Again, I'm gonna just go back to manual.
That looks really good. And like not only does it not have a face light
to help light my face, it's actually working against all this purple bounce.
And I have to say it's doing a pretty admirable job
at making my skin not look totally wacky. Like when I'm looking at it, it looks a little bit off,
but if I was streaming with this, I don't think anyone would comment. It would look totally acceptable, super sharp.
The autofocus is pretty good. It really wants to do my hand.
You can kind of see it in jumps. You can see when I do this, it goes like, da, da, da, da, da, da.
But I gotta say that autofocus is working pretty good at tracking me.
It takes a little bit to make sure that it's got me, but usually when you're streaming,
you're not running around your room too much. And if you are, I would just crank the brightness
in your room and then close your aperture a little bit. And you're probably gonna be covered anyway.
I'm not gonna record the camera free directly into OBS
so that we can get a better idea of what it'll look like in your recording software.
There is a little bit more jitteriness on my monitor.
I had to close the app in order to get the feed because like most video devices
can only be outputting to one of them at a time. Just a really annoying distinction.
I don't know if that's a Windows or OBS thing, but figure it out. But you can imagine if I'm just a tiny little person
in the window, that's about as nice
as I've seen for a streaming camera. And people use much more expensive cameras
than this for streaming. But here's the flip side.
This thing is only a webcam. And that could be great.
You might be someone that's like, I just want the best video quality.
When I'm streaming on my computer, I don't want to worry about it. I'm never taking my camera away.
But at the price of $800, which is its sale price,
but it's one of those sales that goes on forever. So that's really just the real price.
They just want to pretend like you're saving $100. You can get a pretty damn good camera.
The Sony has a ZVE-10. The Mark I, if you buy it, you can get like $400, $500.
$800 new. The Mark II is even better for video, but it's a little bit more.
If you don't like Sony, Canon has the R50, Nikon has the Z30 that are kind of similar price brackets
and I think are much more versatile. However, I don't think that their video out
is substantially nicer than this. And so if you are going to just use that as a webcam,
this isn't a bad alternative. And it is really good. It was really easy.
If you're someone that knows nothing about cameras, the auto settings did a pretty good job.
Not the AI settings, those suck. But $800 without a lens is a lot of money for a webcam.
And if you're starting out in content creation, here's a little bit of a tip.
Video quality matters up to a certain point. And when you kind of get past that point,
there's a huge drop off of diminishing returns for way less than half the price of this thing,
especially if you're adding a lens. You can get a pretty damn good webcam that captures you.
And that's what matters when you're streaming is you,
not the camera, not the gear. Are you fun? Are you engaging?
Are you confident? Are you exciting? That's so much more important. So if I were you, instead of spending $800 on this,
if you're getting started out, I'd buy something pretty good at $200,
and then treat yourself to a massage for $600.
And just enjoy yourself, come back to your stream, super recharge, super energized,
and that's a way better stream, IMO.
Just like this outro is better than the one I did yesterday,
because I didn't do one yesterday. This is the first ShortCircuit I've done this week. And if you're still interested in a camera
in this price range for streaming, we actually unboxed the ZV-10
when that came out a couple of years ago. And so you should watch that one. I have a lot of thoughts back then,
and I don't think they've changed that much since then.